The problem with teaching the “truth”

A Twitter person recently asked for help. He was teaching justice, and his problem was that the opposition was co-opting the important terminology – such as “justice” and “equity”. What should he do?

It should be worrisome that a question like this could arise. If “justice” was genuinely a matter of inquiry here, and the inquiry properly open, then like any other issue, matters of terminology and conceptual clarity should be a part of the inquiry. If it was a genuine inquiry, moreover, what was this talk of “opposition”?

The real problem here, it seems to me, is that someone with power and “authority” established in some way – perhaps by the process of being hired to teach – appears to be using that authority and power to decide what justice is, and then teaching that decision as “true”. He is on the side of the angels, apparently, and this is all the authority that the situation needs. He is in some sort of contest with devils perhaps, the opposition who are trying to influence innocent learners to their detriment.

Without understanding the details of what he believes to be true, the advantage of the example is that the problem of indoctrination that is exposed here still retains its maximum force if we concede that he is right. Let’s agree that he is on the side of the angels, and he is accurate when he perceives that there is devilry afoot. This does nothing to diminish the serious issues of indoctrination that lie in what he appears to be doing.

One of the crucial things about moral judgments is that they are only moral if they are made for the right reasons. The first feature of such reasons is, therefore, that they must be moral. The second is that they must be the reasons of the person making the judgment – the right reason is the reason the person making the judgment accepts responsibility for. We should add a third condition if we want the judgment to be a good one. The reasons must be good.

It is not moral judgement, then, if it is not reasoned – if it is, for instance, merely a trained and conventional reflex. Nor is it moral if we can’t stand by the reasons ourselves; taking personal responsibility for them. “Because Daddy told me”, won’t do, any more than it will do that I believe it because my teacher told me. Our teacher on the side of the angels should know this, because some of those devils out there are probably teachers and Daddies as well, and it would be naive to suppose that they don’t have reasons, or that they don’t teach them.

Are the reasons good ones? If we just follow the views of Daddy, or teacher, we won’t really know. We will just have to trust that they did the work that we haven’t done. We can only judge the quality of the reasons according to the testing we have been able to do for ourselves. The measure of the quality of the reasons is the force of the objections and challenges that they have overcome – as we have perceived those challenges, and weighed them.

Let us suppose that our teacher has done all this well, and is convinced. If he now teaches what he understands to be true, on the basis of his own good inquiry, he is depriving his learners of the moral responsibility that he presumes for himself. He will be Daddy, and they will be children, and nothing will change until they begin, and learn to undertake, a quality inquiry of their own. This won’t work unless they also challenge most of what he stands for.

It is worse, too, that in proceeding in this way, he is legitimating the very process that is likely being employed by his opponents, those devils. Perhaps they will notice this. Indeed, they may well accuse him of indoctrination, too, and claim, in their defence, that they are simply teaching the truth. In fact, of course, that is exactly what they do accuse him of, and also what they claim.

They are therefore employing very much the same procedure, and for reciprocal reasons. Both devil and angel are locked together in a cycle, not only of reciprocal accusation, but of reciprocal justification. Reciprocal indoctrination.

If, on the other hand, the evil ones were cultivating inquiry, as he isn’t, and they were doing it properly, they would be accomplishing more to ensure the moral independence and responsibility of their students than he is doing for his. They would then be on stronger moral ground. Would open and critical inquiry confirm their view? Would it confirm his?

Here, then, is the problem of indoctrination. Indoctrination isn’t relative to the merits, or the truth being pursued. It isn’t the case that, the more noble and righteous our intentions, the less it matters that we indoctrinate, propagandise, by-pass reason or otherwise cultivate intellectual and emotional dependency. The concept of “indoctrination”, as a critical tool in the kit of the educational enterprise, is a serious and important go-to tool, and it must be capable of being applied to friend or foe alike. We must not hesitate in its use, particularly when we agree with the cause for which it is being used, no matter how angelic it seems.

If we think, in these educational circumstances, that the ends somehow justify the means, we are failing in our understanding of both. The idea, for instance, that we could create justice in people, and in their relationships with each other, by standing in the way of the development of their reason, their self-mastery, and their capacity for independent thought, is to corrupt the nature of justice itself. It is to create a subject people; subject, apparently to those who consider themselves to have taken the opportunity to reason, and find the truth. But to the extent that those leaders, in adopting such a method, have not faced up to the requirements of responsibility and agency and what these entail educationally, their wisdom is suspect at the outset. The confidence of learners in them is misplaced.

The naivety of learners is often used as an excuse to “teach” them what we perceive to be the truth. They don’t know what they don’t know (like we do), and if we left them to figure it out for themselves, they would just wander around in their ignorance and childish superstition. This sort of excuse is used far out of proportion to its real capacity to justify what we might teach. It is so out of proportion that there are some who teeter in the edge of believing that there is a necessary conceptual link from learning to teaching – that learning is only possible when we are taught.

We do start by teaching them – training and conditioning them – because at the start they can’t respond to reasons at all, and we need to induct them into a stable and predictable kind of life with us that involves following rules and submitting to our judgment. These rules and requirements, should, of course, be based upon mutual respect as far as possible, and considerations such as safety. It is only in such a context that language can flourish well, in ways that enable reasoning (and questioning) to emerge.

Even quite early, however, the possibilities of reason come into play, and we can see how much can be available to us here from a remarkably early age through the experience of Philosophy for Children with six-year-olds. At six, we are very close to conventional school entry. This shows that, for practical purposes, a very open inquiry approach is available right through the years of compulsory schooling.

A process of inquiry like this is regulated by principles of justice; by principles of equal respect among participants. Unless the relationships are respectful, questions and proposals will be filtered and blocked for inappropriate reasons, distorting what is heard and entertained, and this in turn will  distort the process of pursuing knowledge and understanding.

In this process, too, it is essential that the group itself plays the major part in the respectful regulation of the activity. To the extent that teacher-authority may be involved in getting the process started, it cannot mature if the authority of the teacher is unable to give way to that of the group in the inquiry. This is how a proper sensitivity to justice can be developed in practice – while maximising consideration given to the development of learner agency; of their necessary moral and intellectual independence. The dangers of indoctrination are minimised further to the extent that the process and the rules themselves are equally accessible to investigation. The activity can (and should be) turned on itself.

Notice, though, that in developing the capacity to reason, the proffering of “truth” as understood by adult authority is a handicap, not a help. If students are to become competent and mature judges, it is their reasons that matter, not those of the grown-ups. Thus, even when the learner seems to have come over to the side of the angels, as this is perceived by an angelic adult, the educational responsibility is still to challenge the reasons, not to anoint them.

We want their reasons to be the best that they can be – as a result of the best weighing, examining and exploring by the learner that they are able to undertake. This not only means that what we believe may not be what we should say. More than this, the task of testing reasons may involve encouraging the pursuit of serious challenge from points of view that we may not share.

Indeed, it might even be helpful, to the whole process, if we aren’t entirely sure ourselves, on a variety of levels, and manage to maintain some genuine openness. Once we become intellectually solidified, we are likely to limit their genuine inquiries in all kinds of ways, and if we haven’t quite congealed, intellectually, we may be able to share their intellectual excitement as well. But we should be challenging them, even if the particular challenges are ones that we feel we have moved beyond in our own weighing and sifting.

The reasoning should be at their level, and in the terms that they are able to give within their own experience (this is quite different from the schooling idea of “teaching to their level”, with all the speculations of “other minds” that this involves ). It is at least as important, and perhaps more important, that they exchange their reasons with each other, and proportionately less with us; with people not compromised by our authority, or history. Our authority is already corrupted – by that obedience cultivated in the early years, and by our later employment as teachers, where part of that authority involves satisfying those above us.

Equally importantly, our reasoning and experience reflects our age and our personal histories, which are much different from theirs, just because of the differences in life-stages, but also because they acquired theirs in quite a different historical – and hence cultural – time. Children understand each other in ways that we cannot. Our reasons often come freighted with the wrong things for them.

This discussion has been about justice; but also about the problem of teaching the truth, as we understand it as adults and teachers. This problem – and the problem of indoctrination that it represents – applies equally to every area of content that we might consider of educational importance; every area where truth or justice matter at all. In all cases, and not just in morality, the question of the authority available for belief is central to the possibility of knowledge through education, and that is a problem that is masked whenever we consider ourselves to be teaching “knowledge”.

There is not some well that we can draw knowledge from, just as there is no pouring of it into buckets and pitchers. If learners are to acquire knowledge at all, they must not only be the primary parties to constructing it in their own understanding, they must authorize it as well. At present, no matter how elegant and refined our methodologies may be at the frontiers of collective, disciplinary inquiry, the gulf between the understanding gained by those in that space, and our grasp of the acquisition of knowledge at the personal level by people lower down the schooling chain, is simply enormous, and our practice primitive.  It has advanced little in thousands of years, to our personal detriment, as well as our social confusion and ineffectiveness.

Our practice is a patronising and infantilising hold-over from a pre-democratic past. It is true, and a relief, that it may now be more humane – we are against beatings in schools, and frown on shaming. But the basic principles that constrain and limit our attempts at education are those upon which the schooling model depends; the essential structure of authority which has changed remarkably little over thousands of years, still echoing pre-democratic worlds of autocracy, tyranny, monarchy and top-down hierarchy in which knowledge is something transmitted from elders and betters down to incompetent novices. They all believed they were “teaching the truth”. Like us, they all believed that all the others had got the “truth” wrong.

This “knowledge” might, on one model, be the passing down of doctrine that was unquestionable and unexaminable from generation to generation. Alternatively, it might be thought of as the knowledge of the older and wiser, gained by them through critical inquiry in which they sorted and sifted and weighed, until they could conclude the truth for their own good reasons. Then they taught their conclusions to the young as “truth”, along with some of the reasons they found most convincing themselves; privileging themselves as the competent and wise inquirers, while depriving learners of the opportunity and power to do the same.

This, even if it was to happen, could only be the passing on of very wizened fruit, however. The quality of the inquiry of those older and wiser would always be limited by their own development, by the only soil out of which their “wisdom” could grow. Proper and sustained questioning and critical inquiry would have been absent for them, too, when it had been their turn to be the learners – the eventual to-be wise-folk, brought up to be intellectually dependent on their wise betters.

A third model of this conventional downward transmission would be three-tiered.  Here, the wise disciplinary specialists, no wiser than anyone else beyond the narrow confines of their training, would convert their narrow understanding into something teachable; something that would be considerably different from the way in which that knowledge was gained, and requiring a different kind of rational support because of this difference.  This transmuted “knowledge” would then be taught, together with its pre-packaged reasons, to those who will be teachers. In turn, this will be taught to the young, both with the distortions that were involved in making it teachable, together with all of the errors that arose in the process of this two-stage transmission, including many more mysteries surrounding those reasons.

We could go on and make these models reveal even greater problems for this sort of “truth”, by introducing more tiers. We might, for example, introduce another layer below the specialist. This layer could, for instance, be curriculum designers who aren’t so much concerned with transmitting the findings of the research specialist, but in reconceptualising and incorporating it into some sort of theme or study for some other social purpose. The problems of “truth” and “knowledge” will multiply accordingly. We could introduce politicians into the process. And parents. And employers. And economists.

Learners are supposed to grasp these strange things, that are not their own, and are now very different from the contexts in which they arose. From this mess of distortion and improper authority comes our despair for creativity, innovation, engagement and commitment, in a population in which respect is only marginally functional; often evoked, but poorly understood because of its absence, or its compromise, in the institutions in which learners have spent the better part of their lives.

We persist with the powerful, archaic institutions that are supposed to initiate the young into society, when they certainly don’t model a society that any of us would wish to live in, as evidenced by the eagerness with which we leave school behind us and celebrate our leaving (unless we stay to teach).

We speak and act as if this is the best that we can do. It is tempting to suspect that “respect”, like democracy itself, is just a thin cloak we put about ourselves.  Tempting, too, to suppose that in our undemocratic hearts we believe that the most practical solutions to all of our woes would simply be to make indoctrination very much more effective.